Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

At a certain point we have to acknowledge that a huge share of our economy is just raw predation.

We might also acknowledge that a pretty significant share of people do know that already and just shrug their shoulders to it, convinced that it's better to allow for that than do anything about it.

There's been a lot of work put into distilling "free market" into its most radical interpretation, and lots of people just aren't open to bringing much nuance or pragmatism to bear upon it any more. Many lessons learned painfully in late 19th and early 20th century have been forgotten and the counterweight and containment policies that they earned now tend to get ignored or dismantled.

Always has been.

And somehow instead of trying to make it better, there are never ending attempts to make it even worse somehow ( if some of the patents are to believed ). I honestly sometimes wonder if some of the stuff is not in place already only because public reaction if all those were plopped in place in one go.

Well, why don't the ethical non-predators open up shops in economically disadvantaged areas and offer non-predatory prices? The margins must be huge if they really are predators.

The loot is already spoken for by complements and embedded in real estate prices, stock prices, etc.

Hobbes arguments can rationalize any Nash Equilibrium.

Isn't it just the predators that care about stock price to enrich themselves? Couldn't a co-op exist which offered non-predatory pricing and didn't try to maximize their stock price constantly? And real estate in destitute rural areas is generally dirt cheap.

Of course this could be offered. But, no one wants to do it because it's a thankless job. And if you're going to do a thankless job, you'd probably rather get paid a lot of money to do it than very little

Yeah. Why do I have to pay a plumber to install gas appliances? It's just a protectionist racket.

Point is, it's easy to screech "predation" or whatever but the problem is that every one of these things has some justification that can be used in the abstract.

It does legitimately cost more to run a store like Dollar General than Walmart so the same can of beans has to cost more on their shelf for the same margin.

How much more, how much is justified? I don't know.

Good question, was on my mind too. The problem I could see is Walmart style - the predator will beat the prices of the non-predator down until the non-predator goes out of business, then raise their prices again.

They can do this because they are operating in other areas with predatory prices, giving them the ability to operate at a loss, and relying on the fact that at least some of those areas are not being challenged by non-predators.

Everybody seems to be playing the game right in this scenario. Interesting to try to come up with a good counter.

Does this actually happen? If a community opened up a co-op shop that started eating into the revenue of a dollar store, would the dollar store company try to fight back, or would they just exit that market?

Yes, I guess well capitalize companies could offer unrealistically low prices, but on the other hand, any kind of co-op or community driven organization has the benefit of not needing the margins. Dollar store investors are there to make a buck, if their capital isn't getting reasonable returns will ultimately exit the business and move somewhere else.

It really wasn't this bad in the past on a whole. There were plenty of bad actors, but EVERY actor wasn't bad.

Just look at food recipes American corporations feed to Americans, and their different recipes for Europe that look more like the American recipes circa the 1990s. Everything in America is optimised to the max permissible bad action.

There is one overriding difference between US culture and European culture (and to a fading extent, British culture).

In the EU and UK, shame still motivates better behaviour.

Every single problem the USA has comes down to the fact that shame, in the USA, stopped functioning in the late 1970s.

You're ducking the argument. The loot from predatory practices is quickly absorbed not just by the single player perpetuating them, but by their complements in the economic network -- complements which a competitor would have to deal with on the loot-enriched terms, which turn launders exploitation into a "necessity" and transforms any charity into a weakness that will ensure your replacement. That's what Nash Equilibrium is, and it's an elementary result of game theory that Nash Equilibrium can lie very far from the global optimum. Even the global minimum can be a Nash Equilibrium. We should aspire to do better.

A justification for lying to poor people about the prices of things they're trying to buy? Do tell.

Cooperatives do not get rid of the net negative cycle. Ultimately whatever the benevolent entity ends up being, it becomes a contest of who can bear to lose more money.

Cooperatives distribute the losses but it is still a money pit.

I know we're all idiots here because that's what easy tech money does to people but retail margins are razor thin. You can't just make thoughtless trite statements about what they "should" do because a few percent here and there is the difference between red and black and red means prices go up. I'm sure they're happy to not invest in accuracy when it makes them money but there's a pretty wide gulf between being sloppy because it suits you and actively making a business out of deceit.

As another commenter in this thread pointed out, pricing is the bare minimum for retail. We’re not talking about general sloppiness, we’re talking about misleading consumers on the basics of their transactions.

Yes, lots of businesses have thin margins. But the law (such as contract law and the laws against consumer fraud, which are implicated here) sets the things that a business can’t economize on in order to meet those margins. It’s the same as food safety: restaurants also run really thin margins, but they’re not allowed to store the meat on the counter because refrigeration is too expensive. If they do that, they get shut down by the health inspector.

Businesses “should” comply with consumer fraud laws for the same reason they “should” comply with health codes.